Re: What is GNOME and Getting some real data on users

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi, John.

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005 09:07:25 +1300
"John Williams" <JWilliams business otago ac nz> wrote:

> 
> I have a few vague ideas about what I would like to know, but I would
> rather ask for your burning questions.  Specifically, when discussing
> the issues that are raised in this list, what assumptions do you make
> about how users act and what they think?  I can test whether these
> assumptions are in fact true.
> 


I just read an interview with Matthias Ettrich, KDE founder and Qt
developer, see [1]. He said:

"A typical GNOME user seems to avoid KDE applications as the devil
avoids holy water. Vice versa, a typical KDE user tends to avoid Gtk+ or
Gnome-based applications. This creates unhealthy pressure to clone any
good idea that shows up in one camp, which in turns creates lesser
friendly feelings towards each other."

I agree to this observation but what I'd be interested in: Why is this
so?

A few possible answers have already be discussed in the GNOME support
forum.

1. Beauty: Changing a theme for one toolkit usually means to manually
find a similar theme for the other toolkit and manually set it up. But
themes don't change some things, for example the tree widgets.

2. Confusion: If you are used to one buttom order, apps that use the
other one, can be irritating.

3. Efforts: Desktop integration also means to learn some general things.
Learning two of those is inconvinient, and sometimes also confusing.

4. Low ressources: If you don't have a lot of memory on your system,
running both QT and GTK can slow up your system.

Questions, I'd be interested in: Is there any other possible answer not
mentioned yet? Which of these answers is the most important? Is there a
difference in jugdement about these reasons between "experienced" user
and starters?

Answers on these questions might be helpful for GNOME, KDE, and
freedesktop.org to build appropriate policies: What needs to be done to
lessen the gap between both camps? Maybe a sort of dbus based desktop
identification for apps: "I'm running under gnome, thus I should not
show images in dialogs, use gconf for storing infos, and show the other
bottom order."-sort of thing.

IMHO, higher consistency would make Linux on the desktop more likely, so
answers on these questions are very relevant.


Cheers,

Claus

[1] http://www.fosdem.org/2005/index/interviews/interviews_ettrich